Name-calling is nothing new to opponents of the “global warming” agenda, or whatever it is being called these days.

We even require “war crimes trials for these [expletive deleted] -- some sort of climate Nuremberg,” according to Dave Roberts, writing in Grist Magazine.

Greenpeace distributed my picture and those of a few others - notifying the troops of what we looked like was for some reason very important - on posters at UN negotiating sessions I attended, and in its “Field Guide to Climate Criminals.”

Ad hominem as a substitute for argument is an environmental activist’s staple. The odious, morally loaded “denier” comes to mind. Then there was that unfortunate, if logical extension of the intimidation, posting the photo of one academic researcher on-line with the label “Mass Murderer.”

It worked. She left the field. Who can blame her? So, actual harassment does exist, if not as is now fashionably decried.

Lisa Jackson, President Obama’s Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), just added her curious two cents at Berkeley law school:

CEI has learned of a UN plan recently put in place to hide official correspondence on non-governmental accounts, which correspondence a federal inspector general has already confirmed are subject to FOIA. This ‘cloud’ serves as a dead-drop of sorts for discussions by U.S. government employees over the next report being produced by the scandal-plagued IPCC, which is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars

Although this is seedy and unlawful at any time, it also goes in the ‘bad timing’ file. Or it’s good timing, depending on one’s perspective.

Just as a brand new book further exposes the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)(which scam I dissected here, and in more disturbing detail here), and on the heels of the weekend surprise of a 2005 memo showing President Obama’s cooling/warming/population zealot of a ‘science czar’ John Holdren is the kind of guy Mitt Romney turns to to develop his ‘environmental’ policies, we’ve exposed the Obama administration and IPCC have cooperated to subvert U.S. transparency laws, run domestically out of Holdren’s White House office.

With this morning’s Freedom of Information Act request, the explaining they have to do must begin by providing the taxpayer certain records regarding — including but not limited to user name and password — for a backchannel ‘cloud’ established to hide IPCC deliberations from FOIA.

The IPCC, you will recall, is Al Gore’s co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. And the host over the years of numerous scandals involving fudged and twisted data, cut-and-pastes from student theses, popular magazine articles and green-group press releases and of course the infamous “hide the decline” in temperatures. This is not just one more scandal, however.

This most recent production out of NASA under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) noted at the Tatler here, in response to the American Tradition Institute’s FOIA request and now lawsuit seeking certain ethics-related records of NASA astronomer James Hansen, begs an interesting question:

How the heck is an astronomer making $180,000 per year at NASA one of those “millionaires and billionaires” President Obama keeps coming after — you know the ones, making $250,000 per year or more? Because we’ve found that he’s making that figure just on the side every year, from parties enamored of the way he uses his taxpayer-funded perch for activism, like getting media love for promiscuously swinging around Nazi analogies and chaining himself to the White House fence.

Possibly as entertaining as viewing his financial station this way is that his wealth arose during and sprang almost directly from the George W. Bush presidency, which he so clearly and forcefully reviled. To great acclaim and troubling outside…$upport.

The miracle is that he has continued generating so much income under Obama’s tenure. Mr. Hansen, what’s your secret?

Assuming all goes as the relevant laws appear to dictate is just and proper, we’ll ultimately find out. Word has it that there is interest on Capitol Hill in getting some answers on this latest stonewall by the most transparent administration in history.

The University of Virginia has joined a list of institutions claiming that there has been an actual inquiry into, and even 'exoneration' of, scientists exposed by the November 2009 "ClimateGate" leak, while simultaneously through its actions making a mockery of the idea.

UVa's August 23 release under court order of 3,800 pages of emails - records that UVa previously denied existed - was its second since the American Tradition Institute (ATI) sought judicial assistance in bringing the school into compliance with the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA).

The school has spent approximately $500,000 to date keeping these records from the taxpayer, who paid for their production to begin with.

The university again labored to avoid releasing correspondence directly addressing the now discredited “Hockey Stick” graph produced while former assistant research professor Michael Mann worked there.

At least 126 of those emails were sent to or from Mann at UVa and were central to ClimateGate, which exposed a purported, now disavowed temperature record, as well as the Hockey Stick and related activities by scientists to keep dissenting work from publication. The emails showed scientists circling the wagons to protect their claims, funding and careers.

Former Vice President Al Gore launched a new campaign Tuesday aimed at exposing the “full truth, scope, scale and impact of the climate crisis.”

The campaign, the Climate Reality Project, is organizing a Sept. 14 event and presentation focused on extreme weather and climate change.

For the event, Gore will unveil a new presentation modeled after the one he gave in his film “An Inconvenient Truth.” Twenty-four different people will deliver the presentation in 24 time zones around the world.

“Each hour people living with the reality of climate change will connect the dots between recent extreme weather events — including floods, droughts and storms — and the manmade pollution that is changing our climate,” the campaign’s website says. “We will offer a round-the-clock, round-the-globe snapshot of the climate crisis in real time.”

The new campaign replaces Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, which claims 5 million members around the world. Gore, a longtime climate advocate and scourge of conservatives, will chair the new organization.

This afternoon I am filing a lawsuit against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in federal district court in the District of Columbia on behalf of The American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center. On the heels of obtaining a court order earlier late last month compelling the University of Virginia to produce the long-sought 'Hockey Stick'-related records, ATI's transparency project now seeks to force NASA to release ethics records for taxpayer-funded global warming activist Dr. James Hansen, specifically those pertaining to his outside employment, revenue generation, and advocacy activities.

What we are trying to determine is whether NASA approved Hansen's widespread, well-documented, high-profile and, it runs out, extremely lucrative "outside employment and other activities", permission for which must be obtained in writing, in advance. Public financial disclosures and other documents reveal that he has received at least $1.2 million in the past four years, more than doubling the taxpayer-funded salary of this senior public servant.

This money comes on top of and, more troubling, is all "related to" and is sometimes even expressly for his taxpayer-funded employment, which commenced when Hansen stepped up his "global warming" activism from his NASA perch.